A busy day

We had a large team today and as a result we managed ten mag grids, two and a bit GPR grids and seven earth resistance grids. Good job everybody!

First to the mag. The team extended their survey in the field to the south of Mobbs Hole. Figure 1 shows the overall survey and Figure 2 zooms in on this field.

Figure 1: the 2018 magnetometry survey.

Figure 2: the survey in the field to the south after day 2.

I have annotated Figure 2. The red arrows indicate the line of the ditch of the Fosse. It is salutary to note that a feature as big as the Fosse barely shows in the mag data. Clearly the upper fills of the ditch are largely the same soil as the surrounding topsoil. We can normally see pits and ditches on archaeological sites because they are filled with more organic, and thus more magnetic, soils, the result of nearby human occupation. The green arrow shows a “blob” of higher magnetic readings. The rather diffuse edges to this feature make me suspicious that this might be a “tree throw”, i.e., where a tree has blown down. The yellow arrow marks two strongly magnetic parallel lines. At first I thought these might be something metallic but checking their actual values shows they vary from -10 to +29 nT. Certainly strong, but unlikely to be metal. The blue indicates something which is definitely metal; it has values of -1543 to +680nT! The dark pink arrows indicate a faint line, possibly an old fence line.

We have now covered 6.3ha. For a resistance survey at 0.5m spacing between readings, that is pretty impressive. Res has always been a poor third to mag and GPR in this survey. We didn’t get started until a year after the other techniques when UCL purchased a new RM85, and we have had problems with weather. Hopefully we can fill in the top corner on Saturday.

Figure 4 shows a detail of the area completed this year.

Figure 4: the northern area completed so far this season.

The street shows very clearly in Figure 4 running SW-NE, and slightly more faintly we can see the buildings either side. One problem to tackle in processing data is that very high areas, like the road, can make the more subtle stuff harder to see. If we “clip” the image to bring-up the details of the buildings, the road area becomes one big black blob! One way to get around this is to use a high-pass filter. Figure 5 shows the same area with the high-pass filter applied.

Figure 5: the 2018 survey area after the application of a high-pass filter.

As you can see, the buildings show much more clearly but the road much less so. Especially with resistance data, it is worth looking at several versions of the data processing to get the most detail from the survey.

The GPR crew finished off the grid from yesterday and did another 40x80m block. Figures 6 and 7 are the time slices from the two days.

Figure 6: time slices from day 16 of the GPR survey.

Figure 7: time slices from day 17 of the GPR survey.

As you can easy see, we have some sweet buildings showing. Figure 8 is a rough composite of the sites in this area.

Figure 8: composite of slices in the area of the day 16 and 17 survey blocks.

I need to do some cleaning-up of the various blocks as they were processed at different times and with different software packages, but in general you can see the mass of buildings crowding along this section of road. Very nice!

Signing off now so we can go and start day 18. This may be our last day as the weather forecast for Sunday is dire…